by Lee Child
He moved on to the card tables, which was where he figured the real action was. Card games were the only casino components where human intelligence could be truly engaged. And where human intelligence was engaged, crime came soon after. But major crime would need more than a player’s input. A player with self-discipline and a great memory and a rudimentary grasp of statistics could beat the odds. But beating the odds wasn’t a crime. And beating the odds didn’t earn a guy sixty-five million dollars in four months. The margin just wasn’t there. Not unless the original stake was the size of a small country’s GDP. Sixty-five million dollars over four months would need a dealer’s involvement. But a dealer who lost so heavily would be fired within a week. Within a day or an hour, maybe. So a four-month winning streak would need some kind of a huge scam. Collusion. Conspiracy. Dozens of dealers, dozens of players. Maybe hundreds of each.
Maybe the whole house was playing against its investors.
Maybe the whole town was.
That would be a big enough deal for people to get killed over.
There was plenty of security in the room. There were cameras aimed at the players and the dealers. Some of the cameras were big and obvious, some were small and discreet. Probably there were others that were invisible. There were men and women patrolling in evening wear, with earpieces and wrist microphones, like Secret Service agents. There were others, undercover, in plain clothes. Reacher made five of them within a minute, and assumed there were many more that he was missing.
He threaded his way back to the lobby. Found Karla Dixon waiting by the fountains. She had showered and changed out of her jeans and leather jacket into a black pant suit. Her hair was wet and slicked back. Her suit coat was buttoned and she had no blouse under it. She looked pretty good.
“Vegas was settled by the Mormons,” she said. “Did you know that?”
“No,” Reacher said.
“Now it’s growing so fast they print the phone book twice a year.”
“I didn’t know that, either.”
“Seven hundred new houses a month.”
“They’re going to run out of water.”
“No question about that. But they’ll make hay until they do. Gambling revenues alone are close to seven billion dollars a year.”
“Sounds like you’ve been reading a guide book.”
Dixon nodded. “There was one in my room. They get thirty million visitors a year. That means each one of them is losing an average of more than two hundred bucks per visit.”
“Two hundred thirty-three dollars and thirty-three cents,” Reacher said, automatically. “The definition of irrational behavior.”
“The definition of being human,” Dixon said. “Everybody thinks they’re going to be the one.”
Then O’Donnell showed up. Same suit, different tie, maybe a fresh shirt. His shoes shone in the lights. Maybe he had found a polishing cloth in his bathroom.
“Thirty million visitors a year,” he said.
Reacher said, “Dixon already told me. She read the same book.”
“That’s ten percent of the whole population. And look at this place.”
“You like it?”
“It’s making me see Sanchez and Orozco in a whole new light.”
Reacher nodded. “Like I said before. You all moved onward and upward.”
Then Neagley stepped out of the elevator. She was dressed the same as Dixon, in a severe black suit. Her hair was wet and combed.
“We’re swapping guide book facts,” Reacher said.
“I didn’t read mine,” Neagley said. “I called Diana Bond instead. She got there and waited an hour and went back again.”
“Was she pissed at us?”
“She’s worried. She doesn’t like Little Wing’s name out there. I said I’d get back to her.”
“Why?”
“She’s making me curious. I like to know things.”
“Me too,” Reacher said. “Right now I’d like to know if someone scammed sixty-five million bucks in this town. And how.”
“It would be a big scam,” Dixon said. “Prorated across a whole year, it would be close to three percent of the total revenue stream.”
“Two point seven eight,” Reacher said, automatically.
“Let’s make a start,” O’Donnell said.
43
They started at the concierge desk, where they asked to see the duty security manager. The concierge asked if there was a problem, and Reacher said, “We think we have mutual friends.”
There was a long wait before the duty security manager showed up. Clearly social visits were low on his agenda. Eventually a medium-sized man in Italian shoes and a thousand-dollar suit walked over. He was about fifty years old, still trim and fit, in command, relaxed, but the lines around his eyes showed he must have done at least twenty years in a previous career. A harder career. He disguised his impatience well and introduced himself and shook hands all around. He said his name was Wright and suggested they talk in a quiet corner. Pure reflex, Reacher thought. His instincts and his training told him to move potential trouble well out of the way. Nothing could be allowed to slow down the cash flow.
They found a quiet corner. No chairs, of course. No Vegas casino would give guests a comfortable place to sit away from the action. For the same reason, the lights in the bedrooms had been dim. A guest upstairs reading was no use to anyone. They stood in a neat circle and O’Donnell showed his D.C. PI license and some kind of an accreditation note from the Metro PD. Dixon matched it with her license and a card from the NYPD. Neagley had a card from the FBI. Reacher produced nothing. Just tugged his shirts down over the shape of the gun in his pocket.
Wright said to Neagley, “I was with the FBI, once upon a time.”
Reacher asked him, “Did you know Manuel Orozco and Jorge Sanchez?”
“Did I?” Wright said. “Or do I?”
“Did you,” Reacher said. “Orozco’s dead for sure, and we figure Sanchez is, too.”
“Friends of yours?”
“From the army.”
“I’m very sorry.”
“We are, too.”
“Dead when?”
“Three, four weeks ago.”
“Dead how?”
“We don’t know. That’s why we’re here.”
“I knew them,” Wright said. “I knew them pretty well. Everyone in the business knew them.”
“Did you use them? Professionally?”
“Not here. We don’t contract out. We’re too big. Same with all the larger places.”
“Everything’s in-house?”
Wright nodded. “This is where FBI agents and police lieutenants come to die. We get the pick of the litter. The salaries on offer here, they’re lining up out the door. Not a day goes by that I don’t interview at least two of them, on their last vacation before retirement.”
“So how did you know Orozco and Sanchez?”
“Because the places they look after are like training camps. Someone gets a new idea, they don’t try it out here. That would be crazy. They perfect it someplace else first. So we keep people like Orozco and Sanchez sweet because we need their advance information. We all hook up once in a while, we talk, conferences, dinners, casual drinks.”
“Were they busy? Are you busy?”
“Like one-armed paperhangers.”
“You ever heard the name Azhari Mahmoud?”
“No. Who is he?”
“We don’t know. But we think he’s here under an alias.”
“Here?”
“Somewhere in Vegas. Can you check hotel registrations?”
“I can check ours, obviously. And I can call around.”
“Try Andrew MacBride and Anthony Matthews.”
“Subtle.”
Dixon asked, “How do you guys know if a card player is cheating?”
Wright said, “If he’s winning.”
“People have to win.”
“They win as much as we let them. Any more than that
, they’re cheating. It’s a question of statistics. Numbers don’t lie. It’s about how, not if.”
O’Donnell said, “Sanchez had a piece of paper with a number written on it. Sixty-five million dollars. A hundred grand, times six hundred and fifty separate occasions, over a four-month period, to be precise.”
“So?”
“Are those the kind of numbers you would recognize?”
“As what?”
“As a rip-off.”
“What’s that in a year? Almost two hundred million?”
“Hundred and ninety-five,” Reacher said.
“Conceivable,” Wright said. “We try to keep wastage below eight percent. That’s like an industry target. So we lose way more than two hundred million in a year. But having said that, two hundred million in one specific scam would be a hell of a large proportion all in one go. Unless it was something new, over and above. In which case our eight percent target is shot all to hell. In which case you’re starting to worry me.”
“It worried them,” Reacher said. “We think it killed them.”
“It would be a very big deal,” Wright said. “Sixty-five million in four months? They’d need to recruit dealers and pit bosses and security people. They’d need to jinx cameras and erase tapes. They’d have to keep the cashiers quiet. It would be industrial-scale scamming.”
“It might have happened.”
“So why aren’t the cops talking to me?”
“We’re a little ways ahead of them.”
“The Vegas PD? The Gaming Board?”
Reacher shook his head. “Our guys died across the line, in LA County. Couple of sheriffs out there are dealing with it.”
“And you’re ahead of them? What does that mean?”
Reacher said nothing. Wright was quiet for a beat. Then he looked at each face in turn. First Neagley, then Dixon, then O’Donnell, then Reacher.
“Wait,” he said. “Don’t tell me. The army? You’re the special investigators. Their old unit. They talked about it all the time.”
Reacher said, “In which case you understand our interest. You worked with people.”
“If you find something, will you cut me in?”
“Earn it,” Reacher said.
“There’s a girl,” Wright said. “She works in some awful place with a fire pit. A bar, near where the Riviera used to be. She’s tight with Sanchez.”
“His girlfriend?”
“Not exactly. Maybe once. But they’re close. She’ll know more than I do.”
44
Wright went back to work and Reacher checked with the concierge as to where the Riviera had been. He got directions back to the cheap end of the Strip. They walked. It was a warm dry desert night. The stars were out, on the far horizon, beyond the pall of smog and the wash of the streetlights. The sidewalks were matted with discarded full-color postcards advertising prostitutes. It seemed like the free market had driven the base price down to a penny under fifty bucks. Although Reacher had no doubt that sum would inflate pretty fast once some hapless punter actually got a girl to his room. The women in the pictures were pretty, although Reacher had no doubt they weren’t real. They were probably library shots of innocent swimsuit models from Rio or Miami. Vegas was a city of scams. Sanchez and Orozco must have been permanently busy. Like one-armed paperhangers, Wright had said, and Reacher was completely ready to believe him.
They got level with the peeling cement bar with the cheap beer and the dirty girls and turned right into a mess of curving streets flanked by one-story tan stucco buildings. Some were motels, some were grocery stores, some were restaurants, some were bars. All had the same kind of signs, white boards behind glass on tall poles, with horizontal racks for slot-in black letters. All the letters were in the same pinched vertical style, so it required concentration to tell one type of establishment from another. Groceries advertised six-packs of soda for $1.99, motels boasted about air and pools and cable, restaurants had all-you-can-eat breakfast buffets twenty-four hours a day. The bars majored on happy hours and permanent low prices for well shots. They all looked the same. They walked past five or six before they found one with a sign that said: Fire Pit.
The sign was outside a plain stucco shoe box short on windows. It didn’t look like a bar. It could have been anything at all. It could have been an STD clinic or a fringe church. But not inside. Inside it was definitely a Vegas bar. It was a riot of décor and noise. Five hundred people drinking, shouting, laughing, talking loud, purple walls, dark red banquettes. Nothing was straight or square. The bar itself was crowded and long and curved into an S-shape. The tail of the S curled around a sunken pit. In the center of the pit was a round fake fireplace. The flames were represented by jagged lengths of orange silk blown upright by a hidden fan. They swayed and moved and danced in beams of bright red light. Away from the fire the room was divided into plush velvet booths. All the booths were full of people. The fire pit was packed. People were standing everywhere. Music played from hidden speakers. Waitresses in abbreviated outfits threaded expertly through the crowds with trays held high.
“Lovely,” O’Donnell said.
“Call the taste police,” Dixon said.
“Let’s find the girl and take her outside,” Neagley said. She was uncomfortable in the press of people. But they couldn’t find the girl. Reacher asked at the bar for Jorge Sanchez’s friend and the woman he was talking to seemed to know exactly who he meant but said she had gone off duty at midnight. She said the girl’s name was Milena. For safety’s sake Reacher asked two of the waitresses the same question and got the same answers from both of them. Their colleague Milena was tight with a security guy called Sanchez, but she was gone for the night, home, to sleep, to get ready for another hard twelve-hour shift the next day.
Nobody would tell him where home was.
He left his name with all three women. Then he fought his way back to the others and they threaded their way out to the sidewalk. Vegas at one in the morning was still lit up and humming, but after the inside of the bar it felt as quiet and peaceful as the cold gray surface of the moon.
“Plan?” Dixon said.
“We get back here at eleven-thirty in the morning,” Reacher said. “We catch her on her way in to work.”
“Until then?”
“Nothing. We take the rest of the night off.”
They walked back to the Strip and formed up four abreast on the sidewalk for the slow stroll back to the hotel. Forty yards behind them in the traffic a dark blue Chrysler sedan braked sharply and pulled over and came to a stop by the curb.
45
The man in the dark blue suit called it in immediately: “I found them. Unbelievable. They just popped up right in front of me.”
His boss asked: “All four of them?”
“They’re right here in front of me.”
“Can you take them?”
“I think so.”
“So get it done. Don’t wait for reinforcements. Get it done and get back here.”
The guy in the suit ended the call and moved his car off the curb and swerved it across four lanes of traffic and stopped again in a side street outside a grocery that offered the cheapest cigarettes in town. He climbed out and locked up and headed down the Strip, on foot, fast, with his right hand in his coat pocket.
Las Vegas had more hotel rooms per square inch than any other place on the planet, but Azhari Mahmoud wasn’t in any of them. He was in a rented house in a suburb three miles from the Strip. The house had been leased two years ago for an operation that had been planned but not executed. It had been safe then, and it was safe now.
Mahmoud was in the kitchen, with the Yellow Pages open on the counter. He was leafing through the truck rental section, trying to figure out how big a U-Haul he was going to need.
The Strip had a permanent redevelopment tide that slopped back and forth like water in a bathtub. Once upon a time the Riviera had anchored the glamour end. It had sparked investment that had raced down the
street block by block. By the time the improvements had reached the other extremity, the stakes had been raised way high and the Riviera had suddenly looked old and dowdy by comparison with the newer stuff. So the investment had bounced right back again, racing block by block in the reverse direction. The result was a perpetually moving block-long construction site that separated the brand-new stuff that had just been built from the slightly older stuff that was just about to be demolished again. The roadway and the sidewalks were being straightened as the work progressed. The new lanes continued uninterrupted. The old route looped through rubble. The city felt briefly quiet and deserted there, like an uninhabited no man’s land.
That uninhabited no man’s land was exactly where the man in the blue suit came up behind his targets. They were walking four abreast, slowly, like they had a place to go but all the time in the world to get there. Neagley was on the left, Reacher and then O’Donnell were in the center, and Dixon was on the right. Close together, but not touching. Like a marching formation, across the whole width of the sidewalk. Collectively, they made a target maybe nine feet wide. It had been Neagley who had chosen the old sidewalk. She had followed it as if by arbitrary choice and the others had simply followed her.
The man in the suit took his gun out of his right-hand pocket. The gun was a Daewoo DP-51, made in South Korea, black, small, illegally obtained, unregistered, and untraceable. Its magazine held thirteen 9mm Parabellums. It was being carried in what its owner’s long training had taught him was the only safe-transport mode: chamber empty, safety on.
He held the gun right-handed and dry-fired against the locked trigger and rehearsed the sequence. He decided to prioritize and put the biggest targets down first. In his experience that always worked best. So, center-mass into Reacher’s back, then a small jog to the right into O’Donnell’s back, then a radical swing left to Neagley, then all the way back to Dixon. Four shots, maybe three seconds, from twenty feet, which was close enough to be sure of hitting without being so close that the deflections left and right would be extreme. Maximum traverse would be a little more than twenty degrees. Simple geometry. A simple task. No problem.